Avilés raises coordination problems with catch basins and flooding
Avilés says residents want real engagement and describes having to call agencies to remove catch basin covers before storms. She asks for automatic procedures and contractor accountability.
Yeah, and I think the continued request that I hear is just the community really wanting to be engaged.
And real challenges of coordination.
Like we actually had to call people to tell them to remove one city agency, cover the catch basins with those plastic things, and then we have to call the agency to say, there's a lot of rain coming, we're going to flood,
can you remove that?
Can we figure out a way how that should be an automatic, like, there's a storm, you cover the catch basins in a community that floods, you should remove that and not wait for the council member to call staff.
Yeah, I think that that's definitely something that we're working on, especially also like a lot of that involves contractors, right?
And so that's been one of the really big challenges in figuring out how we manage that and work with other agencies to manage that on a more frequent basis.
It didn't, we weren't trying to cover it, trying to cover them so people don't pour concrete and other things down them.
And now you're uncovering them and covering them and uncovering them.
And it's been nonstop.
So the way that we staff and think about how we're staffing our community relations.
unit and how that's intersecting with our Bureau of Coastal Resilience, I think is going to be a big part of it.
Some of the reason that we're doing those flooding town halls is that sometimes is the way that we can proactively talk to people in a community about what's happening or give them the opportunity to come out and meet with our experts.
And so we're trying to be a little more creative about how we do that in different communities, but we'd like to be doing a lot more of it than we're doing, certainly.
Yeah, no, I appreciate that.
And y'all have done some really great work.
And I know it is a challenge cutting across multiple agencies.
many, many contractors.
And so I don't know if that's something that's embedded just as a matter of practice.
Like when there is an emergency, you uncover these things as a matter of practice in a contract.
And if you don't, and the city incurs costs because of the flooding as a result of that, then maybe you should take
that hit as opposed to us constantly paying for inadequate contractors who are doing things they shouldn't be doing.
But in terms of the office just generally, I think my statement here really is our community would very much like to be engaged on this issue as we are experiencing a resiliency project, which is very unique compared to all the others.
The cheapest of the group, but also weaving in and out of private property.
And many community members are feeling like it's also a pretty inadequate project for the peninsula itself.
So I think there's a lot more.
to be done and a lot of concern and concern around the city's what they call economic development but is simply putting more housing in areas that flood so
how how is the agency engaged in these conversations because there seems to be not a lot of coherence